Bollingen Prize In American Poetry
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Bollingen Prize In American Poetry
The Bollingen Prize for Poetry is a literary honor bestowed on an American poet in recognition of the best book of new verse within the last two years, or for lifetime achievement."The Bollingen Prize for Poetry at Yale,"
webpage maintained by Yale University. Retrieved November 9, 2007.
It is awarded every two years by the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Yale University.


Inception and controversy

The prize was established in 1948 by

Poet
A poet is a person who studies and creates poetry. Poets may describe themselves as such or be described as such by others. A poet may simply be the creator ( thinker, songwriter, writer, or author) who creates (composes) poems (oral or written), or they may also perform their art to an audience. The work of a poet is essentially one of communication, expressing ideas either in a literal sense (such as communicating about a specific event or place) or metaphorically. Poets have existed since prehistory, in nearly all languages, and have produced works that vary greatly in different cultures and periods. Throughout each civilization and language, poets have used various styles that have changed over time, resulting in countless poets as diverse as the literature that (since the advent of writing systems) they have produced. History In Ancient Rome, professional poets were generally sponsored by patrons, wealthy supporters including nobility and military officials. For inst ...
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Robert Fitzgerald
Robert Stuart Fitzgerald (; 12 October 1910 – 16 January 1985) was an American poet, literary critic and translator whose renderings of the Greek classics "became standard works for a generation of scholars and students".Mitgang, Herbert (January 17, 1985). Robert Fitzgerald, 74, poet who translated the classics. ''New York Times'' He was best known as a translator of ancient Greek and Latin. He also composed several books of his own poetry. Biography Fitzgerald grew up in Springfield, Illinois, and graduated from The Choate School (now Choate Rosemary Hall) in Wallingford, Connecticut. He entered Harvard in 1929, and in 1931 a number of his poems were published in Poetry magazine. After graduating from Harvard in 1933 he became a reporter for ''The New York Herald Tribune'' for a year. Later he worked several years for TIME magazine. In 1940, William Saroyan lists him among "associate editors" at ''Time'' in the play, ''Love's Old Sweet Song''. Whittaker Chambers mentions h ...
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May Swenson
Anna Thilda May "May" Swenson (May 28, 1913 – December 4, 1989) was an American poet and playwright. Harold Bloom considered her one of the most important and original poets of the 20th century. The first child of Margaret and Dan Arthur Swenson, she grew up as the eldest of 10 children in a Mormon household where Swedish was spoken regularly and English was a second language. Although her conservative family struggled to accept the fact that she was a lesbian, they remained close throughout her life. Much of her later poetry works were devoted to children (e.g. the collection ''Iconographs'', 1970). She also translated the work of contemporary Swedish poets, including the selected poems of Nobel laureate Tomas Tranströmer. Personal life Swenson attended Utah State University in Logan, Utah, graduating in the class of 1934 with a bachelor's degree. She taught poetry as poet-in-residence at Bryn Mawr College, the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, the Universit ...
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Howard Nemerov
Howard Nemerov (March 1, 1920 – July 5, 1991) was an American poet. He was twice Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, from 1963 to 1964 and again from 1988 to 1990. For ''The Collected Poems of Howard Nemerov'' (1977), he won the National Book Award for Poetry,"National Book Awards – 1978"
. Retrieved 2012-04-07.
(With acceptance speech by Nemerov and essay by Ross Gay from the Awards 60-year anniversary blog.)
,
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David Ignatow
David Ignatow (February 7, 1914 – November 17, 1997) was an American poet and editor. Life David Ignatow was born in Brooklyn on February 7, 1914, and spent most of his life in the New York City area. He died on November 17, 1997, at his home in East Hampton, New York. His papers are held at University of California, San Diego. Ignatow began his professional career as a businessman. After committing wholly to poetry, Ignatow worked as an editor of ''American Poetry Review'', Analytic, Beloit Poetry Journal, and Chelsea Magazine, and as poetry editor of ''The Nation''. He taught at the New School for Social Research, the University of Kentucky, the University of Kansas, Vassar College, York College, City University of New York, New York University, and Columbia University. He was president of the Poetry Society of America from 1980 to 1984 and poet-in-residence at the Walt Whitman Birthplace Association in 1987. Awards Ignatow's many honors include a Bollingen Prize, t ...
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James Merrill
James Ingram Merrill (March 3, 1926 – February 6, 1995) was an American poet. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1977 for ''Divine Comedies.'' His poetry falls into two distinct bodies of work: the polished and formalist lyric poetry of his early career, and the epic narrative of occult communication with spirits and angels, titled ''The Changing Light at Sandover'' (published in three volumes from 1976 to 1980), which dominated his later career. Although most of his published work was poetry, he also wrote essays, fiction, and plays. Early life James Ingram Merrill was born in New York City, to Charles E. Merrill (1885–1956), the founding partner of the Merrill Lynch investment firm, and Hellen Ingram Merrill (1898–2000), a society reporter and publisher from Jacksonville, Florida. He was born at a residence which would become the site of the Greenwich Village townhouse explosion, which Merrill would lament in the poem "18 West 11th Street" (1972) ...
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Karl Shapiro
Karl Jay Shapiro (November 10, 1913 – May 14, 2000) was an American poet. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1945 for his collection ''V-Letter and Other Poems''. He was appointed the fifth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1946. Born and initially raised in Baltimore, Maryland, Shapiro served in the Pacific Theater as a United States Army company clerk during World War II. Biography Karl Shapiro was born and initially raised in Baltimore, Maryland. After spending much of his childhood and adolescence in Chicago, Illinois, the family returned to Baltimore, where he completed his secondary education at Baltimore City College. He briefly attended the University of Virginia during the 1932-1933 academic year, and immortalized it in a scathing poem called "University", which noted that "to hurt the Negro and avoid the Jew is the curriculum." His first volume of poetry was published by a family friend at the behest of his uncle in 1935. ...
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John Berryman
John Allyn McAlpin Berryman (born John Allyn Smith, Jr.; October 25, 1914 – January 7, 1972) was an American poet and scholar. He was a major figure in American poetry in the second half of the 20th century and is considered a key figure in the "confessional" school of poetry. His best-known work is ''The Dream Songs''. Life and career John Berryman was born on October 25, 1914 in McAlester, Oklahoma, where he was raised until the age of ten, when his father, John Smith, a banker, and his mother, Martha (also known as Peggy), a schoolteacher, moved to Florida. In 1926, in Clearwater, Florida, when Berryman was 11 years old, his father shot and killed himself. Smith was jobless at the time, and he and Martha were filing for divorce. Berryman was haunted by his father's death for the rest of his life and wrote about his struggle to come to terms with it in much of his poetry. In "Dream Song #143", he wrote, "That mad drive o commit suicidewiped out my childhood. I put him down ...
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Robert Penn Warren
Robert Penn Warren (April 24, 1905 – September 15, 1989) was an American poet, novelist, and literary critic and was one of the founders of New Criticism. He was also a charter member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. He founded the literary journal ''The Southern Review'' with Cleanth Brooks in 1935. He received the 1947 Pulitzer Prize for the Novel for ''All the King's Men'' (1946) and the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1958 and 1979. He is the only person to have won Pulitzer Prizes for both fiction and poetry. Early years Warren was born in Guthrie, Kentucky, very near the Tennessee-Kentucky border, to Robert Warren and Anna Penn. Warren's mother's family had roots in Virginia, having given their name to the community of Penn's Store in Patrick County, Virginia, and she was a descendant of Revolutionary War soldier Colonel Abram Penn. Robert Penn Warren graduated from Clarksville High School in Clarksville, Tennessee; Vanderbilt University (summa cum laude, Phi Beta K ...
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Horace Gregory
Horace Gregory (April 10, 1898 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin – March 11, 1982 in Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts) was a prize-winning American poet, translator of classic poetry, literary critic and college professor. He was awarded the Bollingen Prize in 1965. Life A graduate of the University of Wisconsin in 1923, he was the author of eight books of poems. He translated poems by the Roman poets Catullus and Ovid, and wrote biographies of Whistler and Amy Lowell. In 1925, he married poet and editor Marya Zaturenska (Pulitzer Prize winner for poetry, 1938; 1902–1982). They had two children: Patrick Bolten Gregory and Joanna Elizabeth Zeigler née Gregory. His collected essays, ''Spirit of Time and Place'', were published in 1973. He wrote book reviews that were published in ''The New York Times''. His work appeared in ''The New Yorker'', ''Contemporary Poetry'', ''The Wisconsin Literary Magazine'', and ''Poetry Magazine''. Gregory's poetry has been described as "literary" a ...
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Mona Van Duyn
Mona Jane Van Duyn (May 9, 1921 – December 2, 2004) was an American poet. She was appointed United States Poet Laureate in 1992. Biography Early years Van Duyn was born May 9, 1921 in Waterloo, Iowa."Van Duyn, Mona (1921–2004)." '' Dictionary of Women Worldwide: 25,000 Women Through the Ages'', edited by Anne Commire and Deborah Klezmer, vol. 2, Yorkin Publications, 2007, p. 1916. ''Gale eBooks''. Accessed 6 Sept. 2021. She grew up in the small town of Eldora (pop. 3,200) where she read voraciously in the town library and wrote poems secretly in notebooks from her grade school years to her high school years. Van Duyn earned a B.A. from Iowa State Teachers College in 1942, and an M.A. from the State University of Iowa in 1943, the year she married Jarvis Thurston. She and Thurston studied in the Ph.D. program at Iowa. In 1946 she was hired as an instructor at the University of Louisville when her husband became an assistant professor there. Together they began ''Perspective ...
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Richard Wilbur
Richard Purdy Wilbur (March 1, 1921 – October 14, 2017) was an American poet and literary translator. One of the foremost poets of his generation, Wilbur's work, composed primarily in traditional forms, was marked by its wit, charm, and gentlemanly elegance. He was appointed the second Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1987 and received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry twice, in 1957 and 1989. Early years Wilbur was born in New York City on March 1, 1921, and grew up in North Caldwell, New Jersey. In 1938 he graduated from Montclair High School, where he worked on the school newspaper. He graduated from Amherst College in 1942 and served in the United States Army from 1943 to 1945 during World War II. He attended graduate school at Harvard University. Wilbur taught at Wellesley College, then Wesleyan University for two decades and at Smith College for another decade. At Wesleyan he was instrumental in founding the award-winning poetry series of the ...
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